Star's Reach (2 page)

There are one or two of these places in most
of the old cities, and sometimes many more. The scholars say they
were built as shelters for soldiers and rulers in the last days of
the old world, and they may be right, for certainly it’s common
enough to find the bones of people who hid there, in among old
machines and cabinets full of papers. There are tools that ruinmen
use to drain the charge out of such a trap, but I didn’t have any
of them with me. The one thing I knew for certain was that if I
lost my grip and fell, my chance of landing on concrete wasn’t
good, and if I touched the floor, my chance of taking another
breath afterwards was small enough not to notice. I truly expected
to die.

I hung there in the darkness for what seemed
like a long time and tried to think of some way to save my life.
The doorway was out of reach, and trying to haul myself up to it
brought down more pieces of crumbling concrete; no escape that way.
Shouting for help was pretty clearly a waste of time, since there
was nobody closer than Berry up above. Trying to wrestle my backup
lamp out of the bottom of bag on my hip would give me a better look
at what was going to get me reborn, but it might make me lose my
grip and fall. So I clung to the rebar, mind racing, while the
scents of dust and lightning rose up from underneath me.

It must have been less than a minute, though
it felt like an hour, before I thought of the tangle of wire in my
pocket. The thought of letting go of one the pieces of rebar that
held me up was not exactly comforting, but no other plan came to
mind. I tightened my right hand on the longer piece of rebar,
reached down with the other, pulled the wire from the pocket of my
coat and threw it toward where I thought I remembered the floor had
been completely bare, then caught the rebar again before my right
hand could slip.

Lightning flared again, and went still. After
a moment a dull red glow and a hot-metal smell began to fill the
room: the wire, heating up to cherry color from the current flowing
through it. The light from the wire, dim as it was, gave me a gift
I hadn’t expected: I could see, below me and a little to one side,
a big piece of concrete that had landed flat on the floor. I gauged
the distance, swung myself over that way and dropped.

A moment falling through near-darkness, and
then my feet hit; I breathed out all at once and landed as soft as
I could. The concrete shifted beneath my feet, but I kept my
balance, and once the dust settled I was able to dig through the
bag on my belt and pull out the backup lamp. Ruinmen always carry
an extra way of making a light, and this was why; the lamp’s pale
light blended with the glow from the copper wire burning out
halfway across the room to give me a good look at the place that
had almost killed me.

The room was much bigger than the closet
above it, the walls rough, as though the concrete had been poured
in a hurry. An iron ladder went down one wall from the broken
ceiling to within a few feet of the floor; a hatch must have been
sealed up above sometime after the shelter was built. There would
be another entrance somewhere, but finding that could wait. Over to
one side, a metal door led out of the room, and a tiny red light
glowed next to it, the only warning the ancients gave of the death
they’d woven into the floor. There would be a switch on the other
side of the door that would turn off the current, if I could reach
it.

I crouched, held the lamp close to the floor
and made out the pattern of conductive strips on it. I’d crossed a
floor of the same kind before more than once barefoot for practice,
with Mister Garman watching, and the charge on the plates drained
until a false step would bring a painful shock instead of sudden
death. I’d never tried to cross such a floor in a ruin no one had
cleared yet, and I was far from sure the copper wire discharged
everything the trap had to offer. Still, unless I wanted to wait
until someone came looking for me, I didn’t have a lot of other
choices. After a moment, I stood up, pointed the lamp at the floor,
and started toward the door.

To this day I don’t know if I did the thing
right, or if the charge was simply low enough by then that my boots
offered me enough protection against it. One way or another,
though, I reached the door, and thank the four winds, it was
unlocked. I had to lean against it to force it open; hinges that
had been still for better than six lifetimes screeched their
complaint but moved anyway. I reached through, fumbled for the
switch on the other side, flipped it. The little light next to the
door went green, and something hard and cold as old metal unknotted
in me.

A murmur of sound from above caught my
attention. After a moment, it turned into the drumming of feet. A
familiar voice boomed: “Trey?”

“Down here, Mister,” I shouted back up.
“Floor in the closet gave way, but I’m fine.”

“How far down?”

I glanced up. “About four meedas. There’s at
least one more room down here.”

“Good.” Then, muffled: “Conn, Berry, get me
that rope. Two more lamps, too.”

It was Gray Garman, of course. It didn’t
occur to me until then that the crash of the closet floor must have
echoed all through the old ruin, loud enough to tell the people up
on the surface that something was wrong and send them running for
help. I was glad of that, since the thought of finding a way up out
of the hidden room had begun to weigh on me.

A moment later a rope came snaking down from
above and Garman came down it hand over hand. Once he’d reached the
floor, he glanced at me, at the green light, at the floor. “Room
was trapped?”

“Good and proper,” I said. “Gave me a bit of
trouble.”

“Well.” He was looking at me then with his
frown. “It’s not prentice work to get past one of those. Give me
your pry bar.”

I stared at him blankly for a moment and then
handed him the tool from my belt. He hefted it, then with a flick
of his wrist caught me with the sharp edge on the bent end just
below one cheekbone, hard enough to draw blood. I managed not to
flinch. Then he was holding the bar out to me, saying, “Take it,
ruinman.”

I took it, dazed, while the prentices
whooped—three of them had followed Garman down the rope, and a
fourth was on the way. “Well, Mister Trey,” Garman said then with a
faint smile at the formal courtesy, “did you check out the room
back there?” A motion of his head pointed at the door behind me and
the room beyond.

“Didn’t have a chance, Mister Garman. I was
heading that way when you showed up.”

“Let’s see what they left for us,” he said,
and motioned for me to take the lead.

By then my mind was trying to grapple with
what had just happened. Going from prentice to ruinman, said the
guild rules, took some proof of skill that none of the misters
could quarrel with. Some prentices did it by plain hard work, and
some by a chance find they followed up the right way, but you could
also do it by landing yourself in deep trouble in the ruins and
getting out alive. The thought dazzled me: after ten years as
Garman’s prentice, I was a mister and a ruinman myself, and I was
about to be the very first through a door that, beyond the last
shadow of a doubt, nobody had opened since the old world stumbled
to its end.

Hinges yelled as I shouldered the door open
and raised my lamp. Garman and the others pressed close behind me.
The light showed a metal frame that once held two beds, one atop
the other, against the wall to the right; shreds of a curtain
failed to hide the toilet next to it. Shelves along the far wall
would have held food and water once, and there were two long
things, guns almost certainly. Over to the left, not quite against
the wall, was a table with dusty shapes on it I didn’t recognize at
first.

We were most of the way to the table before I
realized we weren’t alone in the room. The other person there was a
long way past greeting us, though. He was sitting at the table with
his head and shoulders slumped forward; bits of bone showed through
what was left of the stiff heavy clothing the old world put on its
soldiers. A sheet of cracked and yellowed paper was under the bones
of one of his hands, and right next to that was a box with dials
and buttons, probably a radio. I stared at him for a long moment,
then made the blessing sign, even though he’d been there long
enough that even his ghost must have been dead by then.

I glanced around the room again. You could
see the last weeks or months of the man’s life written there plain
enough. He must have hidden there in the last years of the old
world, and sat by the radio day by day while the food and water
dwindled, waiting for some message that came too late if it came at
all. There must have been thousands of stories like that, since
ruinmen find such things pretty often.

“Well,” said Garman. He’d already examined
the guns, and went to the radio. “The guns are in fine condition.
This—” He motioned toward the box on the table. “—won’t work any
more, but we’ll get plenty for it. Conn?”

Conn was his senior prentice now, and had
been searching the shelves. “A couple of small machines—I’m not
sure what they are—and bullets for the guns.”

“Good. I know gunsmiths who’d sell their
eyeballs to get those. Now let’s see what this has to say—” He
moved the bones of the dead man’s hand away from the yellow paper,
and I raised the lamp as the others crowded around. This is what it
said.

TOP SECRET/STAR’S REACH

PAGE 01 OF 01 R 111630Z NOV
34

FM: GEN BURKERT DRCETI

TO: CETI PROJECT STAFF
ORNL

1. (TS/SR) PROJ DIR LUKACS REPORTS
EVAC COMPLETE FROM NRAO AND LANGLEY. ALL RECORDS AND STAFF SAFE.
WRTF OPERATIONAL AND CETI INCOMING.

2. (TS/SR) POTUS/DNS/DCI ADVISED
THAT PROJECT ONGOING DESPITE CRISIS.

3. (TS/SR) TRANSPORT FOR ORNL
PROJECT STAFF TO WRTF TO FOLLOW ASAP. INSTRUCTIONS VIA FEMA/GWEN
WHEN SITUATION PERMITS.

CLASS BURKERT DRCETI RSN 1.5E
X4

TOP SECRET/SPECIAL ACCESS
REQUIRED

We all looked up from the paper and at each
other. “Mother of Life,” said Garman. “Well.” He said no more, nor
needed to. The words hung in the dry air. I can still hear them in
my mind, wrapped up in the silence of that place of beginnings and
endings.

That was five years ago. Today the promise of
the words on that brittle yellow paper became real, for me and for
the others who came with me—Thu, Tashel Ban, Berry, Eleen, and old
Anna, for whom all this is the closing of a circle and not the
opening of a door. It’s been a long road and I won’t pretend it was
an easy one, but we finally reached the place where, if the stories
are true, the last big secret of the old world lies waiting.

As I write these words, we’ve settled for the
night in what were probably living quarters two levels below the
surface. The rooms in this part of the ruin are bare concrete and
not much else, but they’re dry and not too dusty, and there’s
plenty of space for the supplies we brought here. One lantern
lights up the room where I sit; we turned off the others to save
battery power. Eleen sleeps with her head in my lap, brown hair
fallen all anyhow under my hand. The others are asleep too, except
for Thu, who never sleeps.

We dodged a miserable death getting in
through the door, and killed to do it. I don’t doubt we’ll have
plenty of other chances to die before we find what we came for, if
we find it at all. Still, it’s a grand thing to have finally gotten
to Star’s Reach.

Two: Stories to the Dark

I must have been eight years old when I first
heard of Star’s Reach, since my father told me the story, and that
happened not long before he was called up to fight the coastal
allegiancies and never came back from the war. It was a night a
couple of weeks after the rains, I remember that, and we were out
on the porch of the little two-room shack where we lived then, my
father, my mother and me, enjoying the cool air after a hot damp
day and a dinner of rice and greens and a rabbit my mother snared
that morning. My mother had her spindle with her, as she usually
did, and her arm rose and fell as she drew cotton out into yarn for
weaving; my father sat back in his chair and puffed at a clay pipe;
I lay on my belly right on the edge of the porch and stared off
across the garden in front of our house toward the great dark
shadow of the forest and the not-so-dark sky above it, blazing with
stars. Fireflies danced between me and the forest, and I made
believe that some of the stars had come down to play in the still
air.

My mother’s voice, high and soft, and my
father’s, measured and rumbling, wove in and out of each other
behind me. I had other things to mind just then, notably the
fireflies, and so didn’t hear a word of what they were saying until
my mother let out a sharp little yelp. That made me roll over and
sit up, facing them.

“No,” she was saying. “Maddy’s boy?”

“The one,” said my father. “Came back to
their farm yesterday evening sicker’n a dog. They had a doctor come
out, and then a priestess, but he was already too far gone.”

“Do they know...”

“He’d been out to the ruins. He was babbling
about Star’s Reach before he died.”

A long moment of silence went past. “Then it
was his own fault,” my mother said, in a hard brittle voice that
wasn’t like her at all. “People who go messing around in those
places deserve what they get.”

My father said nothing. After a while I
asked, “Pappy, what’s Star’s Reach?”

“Never you mind,” my mother told me in the
same brittle voice, but my father said, “He’ll hear it soon or
late, Gwen. Might as well be the true story, and not whatever lies
sent young Calley off to die.”